Many people participate in racquet sports such as tennis, squash, racquetball, etc. Regardless of whether those people are novices, recreational players, or professional athletes, for a large number of them there is a goal of improving their skills. Thus, there is a need to develop cost-effective and efficient means for helping them improve their skills, including their racquet strokes.
Recognizing an opponent's stroke and anticipating direction of the shot are also considered to be key aspects of high-level tennis play, but are not tested or trained by any current interactive video instruction. While a number of computer-based visual skills training programs, such as Visual Edge, are available to improve general visual skills such as dynamic tracking, visual acuity, and peripheral vision, these are not tennis specific.
Meanwhile, sport science research studies dating to 1965, but especially since the mid-1980s, have used film or video clips to test and to train (in a limited laboratory environment) tennis players' ability to recognize the type or direction of opponent strokes before the contact of racquet and ball. While these techniques have been used successfully in the science laboratory, however, a reliable and automated (not human operated) system has yet to be developed in a commercially viable way.
Based on the critical role and difficulty that recognizing a player's stroke has on an aspiring player's development, there is a need for new training tools to improve recognition of a tennis stroke. The present invention addresses this need.